Title: Consultant – Feminist Accountability Project
Location: Remote/ work from home
Consortium focus countries: Bangladesh, India, Lebanon, Egypt
Reporting: Program Director – GBV, Well-Being and Rights
Duration: 1 year
Status: Full-time
Project Overview
About Count Me In!
CREA is seeking a consultant to help build and strengthen feminist accountability practices, integrated into movement building and making change for CREA and our partners, within the Count Me In! (CMI!) consortium.
Count Me In! (CMI!) is a consortium that supports the voices and activism of women, girls, trans and intersex people who are often most structurally excluded by their communities. CMI! consists of six members: Mama Cash, AWID, CREA, JASS Red Umbrella Fund, and two strategic allies: Urgent Action Funds, and WO=MEN. As a consortium of feminist funders, activists, campaigners and movement actors, we have access to a variety of networks, alliances, and platforms. The breadth and depth of our reach and the complementarity of our strategies support the realization of our vision of building a gender-equal and just world. The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs selected CMI! as a strategic partner within its Power of Voices policy framework. CMI!’s strategic objective is to ensure that political actors, societal actors, and donors at local, national, regionals, and global levels take action to recognize, protect, and fulfill the human rights of all women, girls, and non-binary, gender non-conforming, trans and intersex people as a result of strong and autonomous feminist movements holding them to account. The consortium supports women’s rights organizations and defenders through three strategies – money, movement building, and making change.
As part of CMI, CREA works with partner organizations in Bangladesh, India, Lebanon, Egypt, Kenya and Uganda.
Position Overview
Aim of the consultancy
This call for a consultant comes as a response to the consistently shrinking civic space, increased surveillance by the state, and targeted attacks on gender and sexual rights by anti- gender actors coupled with increased donor demand for monitoring and evaluation. CREA’s work within CMI!, with our national and regional partners from structurally excluded communities, has shown us how this shift to conservative politics globally presents barriers to organizations’ ability to focus on accountability. This further hampers organizations’ opportunities to access critical funding to support their activism, deepening the economic injustice they experience. In this restrictive environment, accountability practices such as monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) risks becoming an exercise to complete donor requirements, which takes away from limited resources available, instead of more meaningful processes for learning and community engagement. Through this consultancy we hope to work with our partners to establish simple and accessible feminist accountability practices. The first phase of this process will aim to:
- Co-create simple and accessible feminist MEL practices that contribute towards learning and accountability; and
- Build a working model of feminist accountability practice rooted in the social, political and economic realities of partner organizations. This will be created for use by us and our partners, but also as a tool for donor advocacy.
General description of the consultancy
To establish feminist accountability practices to use with our CMI consortium partners from Bangladesh, India, Lebanon and Egypt, as well as for the wider feminist movement. The overall tasks include:
- Strengthening MEL processes aligned to feminist accountability principles of CREA CMI team and our CMI partner organizations.
- Working with partners to co-create realistic, simple, accessible and community-led MEL processes based on partner capacity and needs; and
- Working with the CREA CMI team to co-create realistic, simple, accessible and community-led MEL processes based on their capacity and needs.
- Developing a policy on feminist accountability.
- Facilitating capacity building sessions on feminist accountability for the CREA CMI team and our partners.
- Facilitating data generation, curation and use; exploring varied types of meaningful data and documentation processes with CREA CMI team and partners.
- Supporting the CREA CMI team and our consultants in strengthening and implementing a feminist MEL framework and process.
The assignment will be guided by a strong feminist perspective on accountability, and a non-extractive, decolonial, and participatory approach. Focus on accessibility and enabling methodologies will be central to the work. As a first step we hope to co-create simple, accessible and realistic MEL processes. The MEL framework will be based on the CMI! Feminist PMEL principles with the aim of – sharing power and knowledge, lean and tailored to needs, reflective and adaptive, inclusive of diversity in knowing and contexts, ethical and safe. The MEL framework will facilitate generation of both qualitative and quantitative data. We hope that the process will be enriched by creative and participatory methodologies, including using new technologies, which supports mutual learning among all engaged actors. We hope to document the process to develop advocacy instruments with donors that showcase accessible, realistic MEL frameworks for partners with varied capacities and living in varied environments. This will also form the basis for CREA to work creatively on accountability as a feminist practice beyond MEL.
Deliverables
- Conducting a mapping on innovative tools, methods and techniques used for accountability and MEL in restrictive environments for activism by structurally excluded communities.
- Working with partners to adapt and adopt MEL tools as a part of their project activities, keeping context, relevance, learning and knowledge sharing at partner and community level as key priorities through co-creation, trainings and other capacity building activities
- Carrying out MEL activities, along with CREA MEL Team, including reviewing MEL tools according to partner capacities and supporting partners to use their review activities to contribute to reporting, work planning and strategy development.
- Co-creating accountability principles for partners as well as MEL exercises for knowledge curation, review of activities and partnerships, reflection, and learning with the aim of building better and stronger feminist partnerships.
- Co-creating a working model on accountability practices that are part of a learning agenda.
- Document MEL practices created with implementation partners as an example of accountability practice for CREA to share learning with the CMI consortium and for donor advocacy on economic justice. This model will show how structurally excluded partners can be supported to strengthen their feminist accountability practices such as MEL frameworks that are accessible, relevant and encourage reflection and learning.
- Work with CREA partners to understand their specific contexts, capacities and challenges in practicing traditional MEL.
- Facilitate a session on feminist accountability at the CREA CMI All Partners Meet 2022 with the aim of understanding need, roadblocks and approaches to encourage partners to advance feminist accountability practices.
- Co-create with partners a review and learning exercise suited to each partner which expresses feminist accountability principles and policy, including community-led evaluation, reflection etc., in November/December 2022, for reporting for 2022 and work planning for 2023.
- Review the exercise used for reporting 2022 and work planning 2023. Work with partners to co-create meaningful, community led review processes and strengthen existing learning and work planning exercises.
- Explore methods to generate meaningful and innovative data to support knowledge creation, review and learning for Partners.
- Working with CREA and partners to identify specific needs and constraints for feminist accountability.
- Developing a guidance policy/ principles for feminist accountability and in feminist program implementation.
Life at CREA
Founded in 2000, CREA is an international feminist human rights organization based in New Delhi, India. It is one of the few feminist human rights organizations based in the global South, led by Southern feminists, working at community, national, regional, and international levels. Together with partners from a diverse range of human rights movements and networks, CREA’s work focuses on building feminist leadership, strengthening movements, expanding sexual and reproductive freedoms, promoting rights- based approaches to reducing gender-based violence (GBV), and advancing the human rights of structurally excluded people.
- We like to think of ourselves as a fearless, interrogative, colorful, edgy, sexy flock of birds flying freely to explore, to imagine and to build freedoms together.
- If you are one who is ready to challenge the system when it is needed, you could be one of us.
- If you believe you wish to build a world where an individual must have the agency and right to make choices about sexuality, reproduction and human rights, then you will find the room to explore here.
- Constant learning and sharing of knowledge is an expectation that team members have from CREA, and CREA from team members.
- Master’s or bachelor’s degree in biostatistics, demography or social sciences, or related field.
- Eight to 12 years of working experience on knowledge of learning, accountability, transparency, monitoring and evaluation design and methodologies for human rights, women’s rights, social justice or international development organization.
- Strong background in feminist knowledge creation and training.
- Deep knowledge and experience working with various forms of rights based organizations, such as collectives, networks, civil society organizations and so on.
- Experience working as an external consultant with varied teams and facilitating co-creation of MEL.
- Experience facilitating capacity building sessions on MEL.
- Experience working remotely with teams spread across different geographical locations across time zones.
- Flexibility to travel to different locations internationally.
- Eager to take on challenging conceptual work that requires research, learning and creative and innovative thinking.
- Extensive experience working with diverse stakeholders.
- Self-motivated and solution-oriented.
- Extensive experience working in some or all countries where our implementation partners are located.
- Preferably from and located in the global South.
CREA promotes pluralism and equal opportunity, is committed to diversity in its staffing, and maintains an environment free of discriminatory employment practices. No individual shall be discriminated against because of their actual or perceived age, caste, class, disability, marital status, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or sex characteristics. Compensation will be based on experience and internal equity. A generous benefit package is included.
Interested candidates who meet the required educational and experience requirements should send their CV along with a cover letter, current and consultancy fees to jobs@creaworld.org by 30th September 2022. Please include in the subject line the name of the position you are applying for. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted for an interview.
The interview process will begin on 3rd October 2022 and the position will close within a month i.e. 25th October 2022. If you have not heard from us by 1st November 2022, please consider your application as not being considered on this occasion.